Ammonite (46 page)

“If there was just a reason. If I could just make sense of it. They rode away laughing. Laughing.”

Marghe wondered if Aoife had been laughing.

The morning in Holme Valley dawned blue and hot. Danner listened to a report from Lu Wai: no contact with Captain White Moon’s party as yet. She told her to keep trying, then checked the temporary quarters and the sled moorings, finding that everything seemed to have held up well in last night’s storm. She found Sara Hiam in the field hospital, taking the equipment through a hypothetical diagnostic run.

Danner watched quietly for a while. The doctor worked steadily, competently.

“For a researcher you seem to me to know what you’re doing.”

“The machine does it all.” Hiam hit a couple of studs, watched the display. “You know what the most serious thing is I’ve dealt with in the last six years? Sigrid’s tonsillitis.”

“Did you fix it?”

“Yes. Actually, I did more than fix it. I set up a culture and modified those bacteria so that their RNA couldn’t do anything. Then I reintroduced—Well, it took me two days. And after that, none of us will get tonsillitis again. It seemed more elegant than using drugs.”

“Lu Wai couldn’t have done that.”

Hiam paused. “No. No, I don’t suppose she could.” Her half smile turned to a frown as she looked at an anonymous dispenser on the wall. “Now what do you suppose these are? Ah, skin patches.” She pulled the lever and examined the slippery square that fell into her hand.

Danner smiled to herself and left her to it. The doctor knew much more than she realized, but there was nothing she, Danner, could say to persuade Hiam of that; the doctor would simply have to learn for herself. Just as a young lieutenant had learned how to be a commander.

She returned a sergeant’s salute, feeling good, and headed for the western corrals.

She wanted to have a look at the Singing Pasture horses while they were here. Then she would have a word with T’orre Na, or Cassil, about trading for some of them—never too early to think about breeding stock. Perhaps she should have brought along Said, the zoologist. Plenty of time for that. They had reared horses at home; she knew enough to be going on with. Besides, it would be good just to see some horses again, and there was nothing more constructive to be done until they heard back from White Moon.

Her wristcom bleeped. “Danner,” she said cheerfully.

“Hannah, you’d better get here right now.”

“Sara? Is that you?”

“Just get here.” Sara disconnected.

Danner headed back at a run.

From three hundred yards she could see the hospital was a hive of activity: people were climbing out of a newly arrived sled, Hiam had a stretcher by the hatch, and she and Lu Wai and a native—not from Holme Valley, judging by the clothes—were lifting someone onto it. The stretcher hissed over the grass toward the hospital, Hiam and Lu Wai trotting alongside working feverishly to connect drips to each arm, the native keeping one hand on the injured woman’s head. Another stretcher carried a body bag.

Two Mirrors and another native, dressed like the first, climbed down just as Danner got there.

“Officer Twissel reporting, ma’am.”

Chauhan looked dreadful. Danner had seen that look before; shock. “You’re injured, Officer Twissel. You and Officer Chauhan report to the medic…”she stared at the native, “and I’ll be there to talk to you in a moment.” That native, it could not be… “Representative Taishan?”

Marghe nodded.

“With respect, ma’am.” Danner dragged her gaze from the woman in native clothes and back to Twissel. “I can wait half an hour for the medic. The viajera fixed it up. I’m ready to make my report.”

But I don’t want to hear it
! Danner wanted to shout.
This isn’t possible
! But it was, it had happened, someone had destroyed her people, and she had to hear how.

She studied Twissel; the Mirror’s face was drawn but her color was good. “Very well. But Chauhan goes to the medics. And we’ll find you a chair.”

Marghe stayed.

Danner listened carefully to the report of the storm, of weapons malfunction, to Twissel’s matter-of-fact recounting of stupidity and heroism, of the unidentified and mutilated bodies. But all the time she listened, her attention kept wandering to the SEC rep, to the missing fingers and scarred face, the bare wrist and strange clothes.

What in god’s name had happened to the woman?

Twissel had stopped and was looking at her oddly. “Go on,” Danner said, and forced herself to concentrate on Twissel’s estimate of numbers and speed. Not listening did not make the truth go away: her people, eleven of her people, had been butchered. $he should never have sent them. She should not have split her forces. It was her fault. Her people were dead because she had let them down.

But what else could she have done? She could not have foreseen that the storm would lead to malfunction. But maybe she
should
have expected the unknown. They had spent too long down here, too long believing the natives to be harmless. Too long getting soft.

Recriminations would have to wait. For now, she would learn what she could.

There were still half-a-hundred personnel here to take care of.

“And you didn’t find White Moon’s body, you say?”

“No, ma’am. But there were some that… well, after the tribes had finished with them, I doubt their mothers would recognize them.”

Danner chewed that over. “Why, Twissel? Why did these savages do this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take a guess. They must have had reasons.” Her voice was harsh.

“I don’t think they did.” Twissel’s voice was flat, dull. “Request permission to see that medic now, ma’am.”

“Permission granted.”

Twissel stood.

“And, Twissel…”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You did a remarkable job. Without you Dogias would have died, and Chauhan probably. No one will forget what you did. I’ll want to talk to you again soon, but try to rest now, and be assured that you did everything you could have done.

Everything.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Twissel sounded as though she did not care what Acting Commander Hannah Danner thought, and Danner did not blame her.

Danner looked at Marghe, who looked right back. Even the representative’s eyes looked different, with that scar above the eyebrow. How did she fit into all this?

Perhaps she could explain the massacre. There
had
to be a reason. There was always a reason.

That would have to wait.

She punched Kahn’s code into her wristcom. “Sergeant, as soon as communications with Port Central are reestablished, I want you to request Nyo for satellite tracking of hostiles, estimated number one hundred twenty, last known position at the relay last night during the storm, and heading north. Estimated speed fifteen kilometers per hour. And advise Sigrid that weather information now has top, repeat, top priority.”

She hit OFF. “Now,” she said, turning to Marghe, “I want you to tell me, as plainly as possible, what has happened to you since you left here and why you’re here now, while we walk over to see how Letitia is doing.”

“Part of the message was missing…” Danner stopped five feet away from the closed flap of the hospital tent, Marghe watched understanding flatten the Mirror’s expression, bring a flush to her cheeks. “You mean all this”—Danner waved at the sleds, the stretchers leaning drunkenly against the walls—“all this was a
mistake
?”

“Yes. But not my mistake.”

Hiam stepped out of the tent, wiping her hands on her bloody whites. “What mistake?”

Danner ignored her. “Whose, then? You were the one who deliberately stopped taking the stuff. You. No one else.”

“I don’t understand,” Hiam said, looking from one to the other. “Are you talking about the FN-17?”

“Yes,” Marghe said tiredly. “How’s Letitia?”

“She’s stable. Tell me about the FN-17.” Hiam was very still, very white. Marghe knew this was going to be hard.

“The FN-17 worked. Or at least, it worked as long as I took it.”

“But you said, your message said…” Hiam looked from one to the other. “I don’t understand.”

”The message that reached Danner wasn’t complete. The part that was missing explained that I’d chosen to stop taking the vaccine.”

“But why?”

Marghe wondered how long it would take for Sara’s puzzlement to turn to anger.

“I was alone in Ollfoss, with about thirty days’ worth of vaccine left, facing a journey to Port Central that would take longer than that, if it was possible at all, which it wasn’t.”

“If you hadn’t insisted on going there in the first place, this wouldn’t have come up.” Danner’s voice was shaking.“But no, you had to go galloping off there in the dead of winter.”

“If I was going to learn anything, I had to go north. And it had to be winter: I only had six months.” That all seemed so long ago.
Blame Company
, she wanted to say.

If they hadn’t landed me in autumn, I wouldn’t have had to go up there in the
harshest season
. But she said nothing. Danner knew all this, or ought to.

“But you could have kept taking it,” Hiam said. “To see. You could have kept taking it.”

“No. Thenike told me—”

“Thenike?”

“My partner. She said the adjuvants were poisoning me, that—”

“What does a savage know about adjuvants?”

“That ‘savage’ is my partner.” She spoke very softly. “And she knew enough to save Letitia’s life.” There was a small silence while Hiam opened her mouth to argue, then closed it, and Danner slapped her gauntlets against her thigh, over and over.

“Thenike said the adjuvants were making my body weak. And I needed to be as strong as I could be, to make sure that the virus, when it came, didn’t kill me.”

Danner stopped slapping. “It wouldn’t have come if you’d taken the damn vaccine.”

Marghe did not bother to answer that. “Sara, for you it was months of hard work—”

“Years.”

“Years, then. For me it was my life. But it worked, Sara. It worked.”

“Yes,” Sara said bitterly. “And that does us a lot of good now. Shall I call the
Kurst
tomorrow, and tell them? No? No. Because they wouldn’t believe me.

Because their spy has already told them it doesn’t work, and I’m down here.

Contaminated.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” She laughed, a sharp bark. “So am I.” She lifted the hospital flap to go back in. “Tomorrow, when I’ve more time, I want you to tell me everything. About the vaccine, the virus, your pregnancy, everything.”

It was evening, and Marghe was leaning against a fencepost, watching the Singing Pasture horses, when Thenike joined her.

“You look tired,” Marghe said. “How’s Letitia now?”

Thenike slid an arm round Marghe’s waist and leaned her cheek on Marghe’s shoulder. “Steadier. She’s strong, and the doctor knows well enough what to do.”

Thenike’s bare skin felt cool; the night was warm and soft. A fly buzzed nearby.

“And you?”

“Angry,”
They called you savage
. “At Danner, at Hiam. At whatever disturbed those message stones,” Nothing she could do about that now. She let her breath go in a rush, “Danner’s going to be even angrier when she hears our idea.”

“What do the others make of it—Cassil, Holle, T’orre Na?”

“I don’t know yet. I wanted us both to speak to them, together. They’re waiting.”

But neither of them moved for a while; the night was soft and spicy and peaceful, and the talking that lay ahead would go on until morning. They watched the horses flicking their tails at the flies.

The late afternoon sun was a hot, orangey red, and the shadows of the seven women were beginning to lengthen. Danner stared at the other six one by one, at Cassil and T’orre Na, at Day and the one from Singing Pastures, Holle, at Marghe and Thenike. She could not believe what she was hearing.

“Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,” she said. “These tribeswomen have driven Holle and her kin from their land and slaughtered half their herds. They’ve butchered eleven of my best people for no reason that makes any sense to me, despite what you’ve been saying, and maybe taken one hostage. Now they’re on their way here to wreak god knows what havoc upon us all. And you want to send Marghe here, and Thenike, unarmed, to talk to them.”

No one said anything.

Danner wanted to put them all in a bag and shake them. She turned to Marghe.

“Do you want to get yourself killed?”

“You’ve accused me of suicidal tendencies before, and been wrong.”

“But not by much!
Look
at yourself, for pity’s sake: fingers missing, scarred, wearing rags. By your own admission you nearly died at the hands of these same…

tribeswomen.”

“There’s no other real choice.”

“There is!”

Danner looked to Day in mute appeal, but the ex-Mirror shook her head. “I think she’s right, Commander.”

Danner would not accept that. “Look. Just wait until tomorrow. Until midday tomorrow. Nyo should be here by then. She thinks she can find a way to stop a storm disrupting our weaponry. Then we can escort you to this Uaithne, protect you. You can talk to her all you want from behind an armored skirmish line.”

Maighe shook her head. “That’s the worst thing we could do. Danner, I know these people. Or what they’ve become. They don’t think the way we do—they never did. And now that they’re behind Uaithne, they’ve become unreachable. They’re living a legend, can’t you see that? They’ve given something up, call it a sense of reality, to live inside something Uaithne has created. They no longer think of themselves as individuals; they’re just the followers of the Death Spirit. They don’t care about dying—in fact, they’d welcome death.”

Danner shook her head in denial.

Marghe thrust her left hand under Danner’s nose. “Look at that, Danner. That hurt. For months I was cold, hungry, treated like an animal. I nearly gave up, laid down, and died. The snow up there does something to you. I’ve lived there. I know what it’s like. They know they can’t survive. They’re not stupid. Every year fewer and fewer children survive into adulthood. There’s more and more deficiency disease. They’re dying, their way of life is dying. They know that. But what they can’t conceive of is that it’s possible to live another way. They live inside themselves in a way it’s almost impossible to understand. So now along comes Uaithne, who says, I’m the Death Spirit, death is glory! And they see a way to make it all good again. To die. To kill others.”